Wikileaked: How the U.S. Saw the 2007 Inter-Korean Summit

Wikileaks’ latest release of South Korea-related cables written by U.S. diplomats is sparking a fresh round of stories about U.S-Korea relations in the local media.

A review of the several hundred cables, written from 2005 to early last year, produced no shocking revelations. For historians, they are a nice trove of analysis and context to broader happenings.

Accounts in the South Korean media have varied depending, as ever, on the political view of the newspaper.
The rightish-leaning Chosen Ilbo went with the Americans-talk-about-Koreans angle. The leftish-leaning Hankyoreh plucked out one cable to criticize President Lee Myung-bak’s strategy for opening up the Korean market to U.S. beef, while leaving out other cables showing President Roh Moo-hyun’s administration holding similar talks before Mr. Lee’s election.

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For a sweep of how the embassy covers a single event, it’s interesting to look at the cables that were written from August to October 2007, the period when South Korea prepared for its second summit with North Korea.

Earlier that year, embassy staffers tracked discussions about summit prospects through a variety of sources. Before 2007, the leaders of the two Koreas had met face to face only one other time, in 2000. And a summit with North Korea was considered a potential game-changing event to the South Korean political scene.

In early August 2007, former Mr. Lee, a member of the conservative Grand National Party, had all the momentum heading into the December election. And summit speculation through 2007 concentrated on the political importance for Mr. Roh and his liberal Uri Party, now known as the Democratic Party.

Reuters

A painting of the late President Roh Moo-hyun.

So it’s no surprise that, when the summit was announced on Aug. 8, the U.S. embassy’s dispatch to Washington reported that Mr. Roh “played his ace in the hole.”

The cable rounded up reactions from politicians and analysts and laid out the impact of the summit on Mr. Roh. It concluded, “Roh’s desire for a legacy in North Korean policy also presents the USG (U.S. government) with a substantive opportunity to forward the goal of denuclearizing the North Korea.”

Several of the subsequent cables about the summit, while staying on top of South Korean political opinion, also tracked whether the South Korean officials believed they would engage North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il on his pursuit of nuclear weapons.

A cable sent on Aug. 17 described Mr. Roh’s Aug. 15 Independence Day speech in which he tried to lower expectations for the summit.

And another sent on Aug 20 summed up meetings that then-Amb. Alexander Vershbow had with South Korea’s foreign minister and unification minister. He concluded that no one was sure what would happen at the summit. The ministries’ workers are “in their offices at nights and on weekends, dusting off old proposals and trying to come up with new ideas,” Mr. Vershbow wrote. “However, nobody knows how Pyongyang will react to them.”

In late August, Pyongyang abruptly postponed the summit to early October, citing difficulties with flooding but raising some doubts about whether the event would actually occur. On Aug. 27, the embassy sent a short cable describing anxiety in Lee Myung-bak’s political camp that the October summit would give a boost to the Uri Party candidate, yet to be chosen by the party, in the December election.

In early September, Mr. Vershbow cabled Washington with intelligence about how South Korea got the meeting set up with North Korea. It was something Mr. Roh had been pushing since he took office in 2003, but that Pyongyang only started talking with him about in June or so. The talks were led by the South’s intelligence agency.

Then, a day before the summit, the embassy sent a lengthy dispatch previewing the event. Notably, it said the agenda had not been “pinned down” because no one on the North Korean side presumed speak for Kim Jong Il. On U.S. hopes that Mr. Roh would talk about denuclearization, the cable said they expected him to raise but “he may take an indirect approach.” It said Mr. Roh wanted to talk about peace but doesn’t “appear prepared to look Kim Jong Il in the eye and tell him that the North’s nuclear weapons program must go.”

On Oct. 7, three days after the summit concluded, Mr. Vershbow sent another lengthy cable assessing how it went. It described “frosty atmospherics” but said Mr. Roh largely accomplished what he wanted and initial South Korean public reaction was muted. It concluded that U.S. interests “were not undercut” by the summit.